Five Hundred Soldiers and the Question the World Is Asking

The Guardian reported that Italy's government is sending 500 troops to Milan after days of protests and looting, and that luxury shops in the city had closed. France 24 added that the Prime Minister announced the deployment and that a cabinet meeting approved measures making the detention of minors easier and imposing fines on parents for damage. These are the facts as the world has them, and they are grave enough without embellishment.

The international framing has been quick to place Italy inside a continental story. The Guardian's correspondents have written of a European far right seizing on protest violence to push an authoritarian, anti-immigration agenda, and of governments that seem to have no answer to public fury. Politico Europe speaks of a dangerous winter of discontent ahead of elections in Spain, France, Greece and Italy. In this reading, the troops in Milan are a symptom of a general European incapacity, and Italy is one panel of a larger diptych.

We would enter one qualification. The Guardian also carried a commentary by Alberto Alemanno arguing that each country's protesters have distinct grievances and that the picture of a coordinated, ungovernable Europe is one that Europe's enemies wish to paint. We find that argument worth taking seriously, not because it absolves anyone, but because it insists on the particular. The young people in the Italian protests are not the same as those in France, and the Italian state's response — troops, lower ages of detention, fines on parents — is a specifically Italian choice about how to govern a generation it has not convinced.

There is a temptation, in foreign coverage, to treat the deployment of soldiers as the moment a country reveals itself. Sometimes it is. But a deployment is also a technique of visibility: it tells the world that something is being done. Whether the something addresses the grievance, or only the image of the grievance, is a question the wires cannot answer and the reader should keep open. The commentary in the Guardian asks us to listen to the protesters rather than to those who say Europe is ungovernable. We would add a second instruction: watch what the state does next, when the cameras have moved to another capital.

Italy is reported from outside as a country of recurring crises, and there is truth in the frame. But a crisis is also a test of proportion. Five hundred soldiers in a city of commerce, a law that reaches into families, a season of elections ahead: these are large instruments for a disorder that the foreign press itself describes as partly generational and partly economic. We do not doubt the disorder. We ask only that the response be measured against it, and that the world, which is watching closely this week, keep watching after the arcades reopen.